Here’s a reflection on the comedy I write.
I’ve always held that the comedy that I write gives a view of what it is like to live inside my head, as an autistic person. I use two AI voice generators to give voice to the dialogues that I write. Genni, and Bark. Genni has a large cast of pre-made voices, and is the system that, for now, I tend to use when I need more than two characters. Bark has much less pre-made voices. However, I like the way it reproduces speech more naturally than Genni, even if sometimes it hallucinates pretty badly. I started using Bark later than Genni.
With the move to Bark, I find myself usually using two voices: Finn and Alice. These are just the names I gave to the pre-made voices in my generation system. The native names are meaningless strings of text like v2/en_speaker_1. This is not very user-friendly. I went around and assigned names to all the built-in voices that I plan to use.
So I tend to use Finn and Alice. Why? Well, there’s the quality of the voices, but there’s more here. Finn is the aspect of my mind which tends to misinterpret the world. He will mishear something (I’m partially deaf), or misread something, or perceive correctly but come to the wrong conclusions. Alice is the aspect of my mind that corrects Finn when he goes astray. Alice is a non-nonsense, down to Earth girl.
In day to day life, Finn and Alice operate very fast. A good example is how I saw on the cover of AARP a headline saying “How To Safely Drift At Night.” For those who don’t know, drifting is when you put a car in a kind of controlled slide. One of my friends when I was an undergrad was a rally car mechanic, and a driver. He was the one driving when we drifted. An AARP magazine telling people of a certain age how to drift would certainly be strange. This was Finn’s misconception. However, Alice popped up in a fraction of a second to set Finn straight. Alice read the headline properly. The headline read “How to Safely Drive At Night.” Mystery solved!
When I write comedy, I slow down the interaction between Finn and Alice so that I have something to show. If they operated the way they do in my head, everything would happen in a fraction of a second.
If you wonder which productions of mine use Bark, when you hear a male voice with a lot of “er…” and “hmm…,” that’s Bark. Here’s a good example of Finn and Alice in action:
Where To Find It
You can find my English productions here:
https://www.youtube.com/@YourAutisticLife
And here:
https://spectra.video/c/your_autistic_life/videos
I also write in French but much less frequently than English. I’ve not yet used Bark for these productions. They are here: